1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a video story browsing system and more particularly to a contents-based video story browsing system defining and representing the relationship of significant factors in a video story. The factors includes an object, a place, and/or an event in time. The present invention also relates to a video story browser representing an overall outline consisting of paragraphs summarizing significant events for a convenient video story browsing.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Video browsers and video story summarization in the related art generally utilize key frames to represent a large a amount of story contents. Thus, it is difficult and/or complicated to summarize and browse the overall content of a movie or drama by extracted key frames or a character-based story browsing. Moreover, presenting contents of some scenes is ambiguous, making it difficult browse the exact information.
Although picture images of a drama or a movie progress by interconnection of events, key frame browsing or character-based browsing is simply performed without presenting any interconnected relations of events. A video story browsing technique has been proposed for summarizing and browsing the overall contents by extracting key frames from dynamic images and graphically showing the time relationship of each key frames. This technique may be usable for a simple video file, but is not suitable for video files of huge volume such as a drama or movie with numerous interconnected events over time. Moreover, because picture images of greater volume produce a large number of key frames, it is difficult to graphically represent key frames. Accordingly, it is hard for a user to understand the graphically represented information.
Another technique of key frame-based video story summarization and browsing has been proposed in which classes are formed according to a length of a section from which a key frame is extracted. Generally, a small number of key frames are extracted from sections of longer lengths for higher classes and a greater number of key frames are extracted from sections of smaller sections for lower classes, thereby forming a tree structure. However, this structure cannot be used comprehensively to browse the overall contents with representative scenes because the key frames are extracted from a too large section for the higher classes, making it difficult to retrieve a desired part using the key frames.
Still another object-based browsing technique has been proposed in which objects of dynamic images are organized and an attribute of each object in a section is displayed. However, this technique also makes it difficult to understand the overall contents. In addition, it is often difficult to determine which attribute should be designated for each object during a search algorithm.
Therefore, since video stories such as a drama or movie progress by changing characters and places in time, it would not only be impossible to summarize the contents, but would be difficult to browse the overall contents just by watching extracted characters or scenes.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to solve at least the problems and disadvantages of the related art.
An object of the present invention is to provide a content-based video story browsing system.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a video story browsing system summarizing the contents of a video story according to the relations of an object, a place, an event, and time.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a content-based video story browsing system allowing a browsing by a relational graph reflecting a development of events in time with respect to a main object and place in a movie or drama.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a content-based video story browsing system allowing a browsing by sections of a movie or drama, each section describing events with respect to an object and a place in the section of the movie or drama.
Still a further object of the present invention is to provide a content-based video story browsing system allowing a browsing by relation of a main object and a place in which one relation is represented by a frame and description corresponding to the section of the story containing the relation.
Still a further object of the present invention is to provide a contents-based video story browsing system allowing browsing a video story based upon contents of a video story expressed by relations of a main object, a place, and an event, in which relations of plural objects and a place as well as the relations of one object and one place can be browsed.
Still a further object of the present invention is to provide a contents-based video story browsing system allowing summarization and browsing of a video story by displaying the contents of the video story in event paragraphs, in the form of a text or a text and representative scenes.
Additional. advantages, objects, and features of the invention will be set forth in part in the description which follows and in part will become apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art upon examination of the following or may he learned from practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and attained as particularly pointed out in the appended claims.
To achieve the objects and in accordance with the purposes of the invention, as embodied and broadly described herein, the present invention discloses a contents-based video story browsing system based upon relations of objects and places. The contents-based video story browsing system includes a scheme indicating a video story section and a representative scene as information for the development of the story events.
According to another embodiment of the present invention, a contents-based video story browsing system includes steps of selecting objects and places as factors organizing the contents of a video story and setting a relational graph relating the objects to corresponding places; setting a video story section and a representative scene as an event of contents development corresponding to the relations of the objects and the places; and displaying the video story section and the representative scene and its contents as the browsing information corresponding to the relation selected from the relational graph.
According to another embodiment of the present invention, a contents-based video story browsing system includes the steps of setting a relational graph of main objects and places as factors organizing contents of a video story, and adding an event description of text along with position information of sections corresponding to the relation and a representative frame position information representing each section; displaying an object-place relational graph of the video story; and if at least one relation is selected from the relational graph, displaying a representative frame of each section in the selected relation and an event description based upon the position information, and screening a user-desired section.
The contents-based video story browsing system further includes a step of setting the object-place relational graphs with respect to the overall video files and each video file, and schematically browsing the overall contents of several video files from the relational graphs with respect to the overall video files and browsing in detail each video file.
According two another embodiment of the present invention, the overall outline of a video story is divided by significant events and event paragraphs representing each events, and a scheme indicating a video story section corresponding to each event paragraph is set. If a certain event is selected, the information about the corresponding story section is displayed in response to the selection.